Rising sea levels threaten YVR with severe flooding, Senate report says
CTV
Rising sea levels could prove catastrophic for Vancouver International Airport, according to a new report from the Senate of Canada looking at the risks climate change poses to critical infrastructure across the country.
Rising sea levels could prove catastrophic for Vancouver International Airport, according to a new report from the Senate of Canada looking at the risks climate change poses to critical infrastructure across the country.
The committee report released last week, titled Urgent: Building Climate Resilience Across Canada’s Critical Transportation Infrastructure, includes four case studies that represent different climate-related challenges: the Chignecto Isthmus between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, Canada’s North, the Great Lakes St. Lawrene Seaway, and Vancouver’s airport and marine port.
For Vancouver’s people-and-goods movers, the key threats are flooding brought on by rising sea levels and increased precipitation, as well as earthquakes, according to the report.
YVR, Canada’s second-busiest airport, is built on Richmond’s Sea Island in the Fraser River and is surrounded by a dike system that protects it from flooding and erosion.
Putting that system at risk is the fact that sea level rise is predicted to be more than a metre by 2100 in B.C. and extreme precipitation is expected to increase by about 7 per cent for every degree of warming, Dr. Xuebin Zhang, a climate scientist at the University of Victoria, told the committee.
“This combination of sea level rise and increase in extreme precipitation will cause more severe flooding,” he said. “The confidence about this projection is very high.”
“I will mention Vancouver’s YVR airport, as it is located in the flood plain. This means that sea-level rise, storm surges, changing weather patterns and potential earthquakes may significantly impact the functioning and operating capacity of the airport,” Kees Lokman, a landscape architect at the University of British Columbia told the committee.
